It was a well-intentioned compliment that took Adam Dolgin aback. The Toronto dad had taken his then-nearly 2-year-old daughter out for breakfast on a Saturday while his wife was at work. He sat with another dad he knew, out with his son. An older woman at another table kept looking over throughout their meal. On her way out she stopped to tell them how proud she was of them for being great dads.

“When my wife’s out with the kids, no one’s walking up to her and saying that,” said Mr. Dolgin, 39, acknowledging that the beaming older woman was likely just not used to seeing dads out alone with their children.

“[But] I don’t need a pat on the back,” he said. “I’m their parent, not their babysitter.”

The era of the “involved dad,” as Mr. Dolgin, who runs the blog Fodder4Fathers.com calls himself, is in unquestionably upon us — many couples are forging an equal partnership in which moms and dads operate a home according to what makes sense for their family.

A new survey released Wednesday by the BabyCenter website and Men’s Health magazine finds 61% of dads put their family before work and are 2.8 times more likely to help with a new baby than even back in 2006. According to 2010 data from Statistics Canada, 11% of two-parent families in Canada have stay-at-home dads. With each consecutive year, more and more fathers are taking paternity leave.

“Fathers are launching a quiet revolution,” reads a new report from the Boston College Center for Work & Family released Thursday. It connects the wave of involved fathers to “women’s steady and certain progress toward greater prominence in higher education and the fastest growing professions.” They’re sick of the dad-as-buffoon caricature, bumbling his way through childcare as if handicapped by the restraint of their forefathers. And they’re running into the same workplace “juggle” issues so often talked about in the context of mothers.

Just as society has taken a long time to catch up with the advances of women, men are now facing an uphill battle as they seek to be engaged fathers, there for their kids at a time when the traditional models of yesterday still shape social expectations.

“There’s clearly a change happening,” said Fred Van Deusen, a senior research associate at the Boston College Center for Work & Family. Men are spending more time with their children and the Center’s data on stay-at-home fathers suggests they’re good at it, he said.

“That’s definite. That’s happening and society needs to understand that’s happening. [But] both the cultures at work and cultures broadly in society haven’t adjusted to that yet.”

Andrea Doucet, the Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., characterizes society’s acceptance of the “New Dad” as molasses-slow. She’s been studying the stay-at-home dad in Canada for the past 20 years and even today the reaction Mr. Dolgin got that day in the restaurant is par for the course.

“In some ways, things have not changed as much as one would think they would have by now. But on the other hand … there’s now a conversation.”

For example: Kindling Quarterly, a magazine just for dads launched in Brooklyn this February. The two issues so far are packed with photos of hipster-cool dads playing with and caring for their children. It’s as visually aspirational as Vogue and as high-brow as The Atlantic Monthly, reaching a demographic of young, upwardly mobile fathers who want to be taken seriously in that role.

“As a society, I think we are just now starting to have a meaningful discussion about fatherhood, outside the reactionary dichotomy of the incompetent/emotionally absent dad vs. the overly-mocked helicopter dad,” editor/publisher David Michael Perez wrote in an email to the Post. “Having said that we still have a long way to go — there is still a unspoken imperative that men shouldn’t honestly talk about fatherhood (the joys and challenges) less they be shamed or ridiculed.”

Kagan McLeod, with apologies to Whistler’s Mother

Even if the men with breadwinner wives are totally content with the dynamics of their relationship, there’s still a deeply entrenched expectation out in society that men are the breadwinners, Mr. Van Deusen said.

A new report from the Pew Research Center last month said women are breadwinners in 40% of American households with children. A closer look at the data, however, shows that most of these breadwinners are single mothers. Of the 60% of households that are dual career partnerships, in a quarter of those, the woman hauls in more money.

Sociologists often talk about a “culture lag,” in which the culture itself shifts and people’s behaviours catch up. The opposite seems to be happening with involved dads, said Glenda Wall, a professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who researches cultural portrayals and understandings of mothers, fathers and children.

“The behaviour of men is changing a lot faster than the culture itself and I think it’s the men changing that are having a bigger pushback on that culture,” she said.

The biggest pushback from men has come in the form of vocal protest to the way fathers are depicted in commercials for parenting products. And advertisers are only just now starting to respond.

Last year, a petition on Change.org successfully pressured Huggies diapers to pull an ad that showed men engrossed in the “challenge” of being left alone for an entire weekend with the baby. The company now shows fathers as not just competent, but expert and discerning diaper-changers.

While the puzzled papa is still an advertising staple, this year’s crop of pre-Father’s Day commercials are far more respectful and, many would argue, more accurate in their portrayals of the modern father. An Oral-B ad that flashes video clips of dads cuddling their children, feeding them, and kissing them at graduation, is being lauded by daddy bloggers, whose ranks have exploded in the past five years.

‘As a society, I think we are just now starting to have a meaningful discussion about fatherhood’

Marketing to fathers is a “nice-to-have” right now, not a “need-to-have,” since more women are still shopping for the family, said Rebecca Brown, chief ideas officer at Rec Room, a consultancy that helps marketers connect with families.

“The reason I think we’re at the beginning of a shift is we’re really only starting to see Gen Y become parents,” she said. It’s a generation that invests a lot more in their social relationships and family life, she said.

“Their expectations will be that the dads and the moms … [are] absolutely going to be there for soccer games.”

This is already an expectation at Deloitte, a major professional services firm that has long promoted flexible work arrangements.

A recent Bloomberg Businessweek cover story titled “Lean Out: Working Dads want family time, too” profiled an internal company program in Toronto called Deloitte Dads.

The group, headed up by Rob Lanoue, 44, Andrew Hamer, 30, and Jonathan Magder, 35, knows it’s a rare breed — a father-specific forum to discuss “parenting issues” and stamp out any lingering stigma about being “as serious about parenting as … making partner,” the Bloomberg article reads. The program has been a huge success, and they’re hoping to expand to Calgary and other cities.

Just last week, Mr. Magder ducked out of work to attend his daughter’s fun day at school. He made up the time at home — a place he tries to be for dinner at least three times a week.

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“That’s not an equally shared or primary breadwinner [set-up],” Prof. Wall said of Mr. Magder’s thrice-weekly home-for-dinner target. Despite their desire to be more involved, men are still away from home more and are expected to be more removed than mom, she said. The attachment parenting trend that focuses on the primary attachment figure — often the mother, thanks to the emphasis on breastfeeding — also tends to shut men out from early bonding with the child, she said.

Working fathers also don’t tend to carry the guilt of being away from home that working moms do, she said, but they can feel pressure from both sides: The growing expectation that dad will be at that soccer game, and the expectation that nothing will change for a man in the office once he becomes a father.

Data from the Boston College Work & Family Center report found that in 2011, 96% of fathers said their managers’ expectations of them at work remained the same, while 3% said they had risen. Virtually none of those dads reduced their hours spent at work.

Mr. Magder said he has friends — some of them lawyers — who have been too afraid to ask for paternity leave due to the demands and culture at work.

While society’s response to involved fathers is indeed shifting, it may take “at least a generation” to be seen as the norm, said Prof. Doucet from Brock University. Those generational differences in expectations explains why a well-intentioned senior citizen might give Mr. Dolgin a pat on the back for being a “good father” when, in his mind, he’s just being a parent.

“We still think of fathers more comfortably as more involved secondary parents instead of primary parents,” Prof. Wall said. “But the trends are in the right direction.”